Fire damage can hit your home; you could lose your house. What would you do about all those important pieces of paperwork and other essentials that you’d need to replace if your originals burnt? You need an airplane’s ‘black box’.
Your ‘black box’ is a fire proof safe to keep your important papers and important family items, but whatever you do, don’t keep your Will or your power of attorney in it!
Here’s what you’d need to put into your safe:
1. Your insurance policies and contact information; you’ll need this straight away after a fire or other home damage
2. Passports and birth certificates can be slow and costly to replace so keep them safe
3. Keep a list of your family’s medications, prescriptions, doctor’s information; you may need new prescriptions quickly
4. A hard drive or CD/DVDs of family photos is important as the loss of these is devastating, and value way beyond their financial cost. They may be impossible to replace. The same could be said of your MP3 collection!
5. Investment papers, pension documents, bank and building society information and relevant contact information. You may need to contact them quickly
6. Debts, credit card bills with due dates and contact information. Missing payment dates could lead to further bills and charges
7. Anything to do with national insurance, numbers and information; benefit details
8. Copies of your Will, copies of your power of attorney, copies of your living will, copies of your house title deeds, foreign property information. It’s important that you don’t keep your originals in the fire safe as all other documents listed in 1 to 7 above can be replaced, even with hassle, but your originals can’t be replaced – you’d have to start again. The copies you should keep in your safe will help you contact your will writing company to get new copies to you. If you had the original Will and power of attorney for example, you’d need new versions so they can be signed and witnessed again and therefore, legally valid. The originals should be kept in your will writing company’s bomb proof, fire proof, water proof safes. Those safes will withstand almost certainly anything your home safe may not, but something at home is much better than nothing.
Always use your will writing company’s safe storage facility (having asked about its quality first!) - don’t risk it for the sake of a few pence a day.
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Filed under: Legal Advice
There’s no other solution to protecting your important documents from fire or theft but to use a safe. Choosing the best quality safe is crucial, you may have bought a very cheap safe however you end up losing the files, documents ,etc., because of its poor quality in securing your important financial papers.